


Fiat Lux

by Tromper



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Caleb/The Luxon (if you squint), Gen, It's all pointless ruddy speculation, Speculation, Spoilers up to S2E77, The next episode will almost certainly contradict this, standalone work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-11-02 09:16:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20696696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tromper/pseuds/Tromper
Summary: Something unexpected happens while searching for another Beacon.





	Fiat Lux

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the latest episode (S2E77). This idea would not get out of my head.  
Edited by my usual proofreader, a friend who needs to start writing fanfiction as well, so I can read it.

The search had not been fruitful. Every day that dawned in the empire wound the tension between his shoulders tighter. It felt like his first year out of the asylum again, jumping at shadows, at kind words, at strange looks, always expecting an ambush to be waiting for him. And the search had not been fruitful. 

The Gentleman had promised to keep his ear to the ground, to keep a look out in exchange for a favour. Pumat Sol had been a risk that Jester and Caduceus had taken without asking the group, a risk that still felt chill in Caleb’s mind despite their confidence. They had performed the Gentleman’s task – a disruption of supply lines on the way out of Zadash – but had yet to hear anything from him, or from Pumat Sol. 

Beau had done what she could, contacting the Cobalt Soul, but they were, understandably, in disarray. They had been able to provide some leads regarding the movements of the Archmages, but the timelines were so loose as to be almost useless. 

Trying for Rexxuntrum had been a mistake. The ambush on the road had been everything Caleb had been expecting, and a chill reminder that the Empire was no longer safe for them. 

Blumenthal held nothing but ghosts. Ikithon’s manor was filled with harsh memories and harsher traps. It had been a calculated risk with the owner away, and they had filled their pockets with notes, and scrolls, and trinkets that Ikithon was sure to miss, but there had been no beacon, and the notes were too dangerous, too likely to be tracked or trapped, to read so close to the heart of the Empire.

They had had no leads, and so they had turned to the gods.

The Wildmother, once Caduceus managed to explain the beacons to her, provided guidance – of a sort. 

Caduceus’ vision, of fields enclosed by drystone walls, had narrowed their search down, but the Wildmother’s guidance had remained frustratingly non-specific each time they’d tried for more details. And so, they had been wandering around the fields of Glenbervie for two days, from field to field, asking Caduceus if he recognized anything. Caduceus was rightly becoming frustrated, and Caleb winced in sympathy as Jester once again gestured at a nondescript dell, hemmed in with stone walls, where a single renegade sheep stood munching on the lush grass, and asked Caduceus if he recognized it.

The firbolg’s face screwed up in frustration, and he huffed a breath out his nose as he glared at the field.

“It could be? It’s like the one we saw yesterday with that tree…” he said, tension swirling beneath his usual languor.

“Perhaps we should stop here for lunch?” Caleb proposed, before Fjord had time to say anything about the Wildmother. 

It was unsurprising when Caduceus immediately agreed, along with Nott and Jester, and Caleb was glad that Fjord backed off. For all that they were both now in her service, the two of them were beginning to rub each other the wrong way, and Caduceus didn’t need any more salt in his wounds.

They arranged themselves along the inside of the low wall, where the sun had had time to warm the stones and they would be somewhat obscured from view. Their provisions were dismal, and mostly maggot infested. The farmer who’d agreed to put them up in the barn had explained that maggots and weevils were how they had enough food to share at all – everything else had gone to army requisition officers. It was a clever trick, to turn food ruiners into food, though not many of Caleb’s companions seemed to appreciate it as much as he did. Fjord was diligently plucking maggots out of his cheese, while Caduceus added some of his precious spices to the bland substitute he’d summoned for them.

“I can’t believe you’re eating that,” Beau said, wrinkling her nose at him in disgust as he dug into his own sandwich.

Caleb made a face at her as he finished the mouthful, focusing on the flavour of the cheese rather than the oddness of it wriggling. 

“It is perfectly edible, and I paid two coppers for it,” he told her once he’d swallowed.

She made a gagging sound, and he looked her in the eye as he took his next bite. She looked away and pretended to actually be sick onto the grass between her and Jester. Caleb resisted the urge to grin at her with bugs in his teeth, mostly because he did need to focus on not thinking about chewing them in order to get through his lunch.

Nott had also doled out two copper, and wasn’t quite so restrained. She called Beau a wimp from her look-out perch on top of the wall, and Beau threw out a few choice words of her own. Caleb rocked himself sideways and pulled his novel out as they began to tussle in the grass, Nott’s sandwich left to crawl away between the stones. 

With all said and done, they were doing a piss-poor job of repaying Essek and accruing favour with the Dynasty, and doing a very good job of being labelled as criminals and public menaces throughout the Empire. The slim romance volume he’d picked up in Zadash was doing nothing to calm his nerves. He was getting the horrible impression that the bandit lover was rather doomed – it was only a matter of time before his beloved’s Crownsguard brother discovered them. 

He was distracted from the bandit’s attempt to convince his beloved to run away with him, by Nott letting out a genuinely anguished cry. He looked up to see her patting herself down, a look of horror on her face. Beau looked surprised and worried.

“What is it, Nott?” he asked, cutting off Beau’s confused apology.

She glanced up at him, distress gaping her sharp mouth, before falling to her knees and beginning to pat the ground.

“My ring,” she said, sounding on the verge of tears. “My Ring of Waterwalking fell off. It’s… It’s…”

“Let me,” he said, snapping his book closed and pulling out his spell-book. 

He knew the spell, but he liked the reassuring weight of the book in his hand just the same as he flopped it open to his Detect Magic spell and swiftly shifted his hand through the familiar motions, reading the quick incantation from the page. Almost immediately, the threads of the Weave flickered into view, and he could see the distortion of her ring in the grass. He lost no time scrambling for it, returning it to her clutching fingers, all too aware of how panic could feel like drowning. And then something caught his eye. A distortion in the Weave like a twisting storm, embedded in one of the stones of the wall. It seemed oddly familiar. 

“There is something in the wall,” he told the others as he frowned at it. 

“Another magic thing?” Jester asked.

“Ja, something…” he murmured, walking over to crouch at the spot.

The stone bending the Weave was in the interior of the wall, only visible because the wall lacked mortar, and even then it was hidden from almost every angle other than the one he’d been at when returning Nott’s ring. The air smelt perhaps a little more strongly of thyme than was justified by the stubborn patch growing a ways down the wall. He frowned a little more, and gestured for Jester.

“Can you move these stones?” he asked. “I want to get at the one in there, the magic one.”

“Okay, but you have to move out of the way,” she said, bustling over. 

He nodded and stepped aside. Fjord moved in to help, and probably to make a point about his newfound muscle. It took less than a quarter of an hour to tear the wall down to where Caleb had seen the magic, and he stopped them as they uncovered it. 

With the spell faded, the rock looked like any other. Slowly and carefully, he climbed over the rubble and, with a little effort, picked it up. Turning it over, his fingers found the anomaly before his eyes did. A flat surface with an angled straight edge. Just the slightest difference between the greys, the glow indistinguishable in the light of day. A beacon embedded in the rock.

Caleb took a few steps away and sat down abruptly. Beau started to speak, but he ignored her as he pulled his spell-book back out and began the ritual to cast Identify on the stone inside the stone. The others discussed his find somewhere beyond the edge of his focus, doubtless racing ahead with plans and strategies while he took care of more immediate concerns. The central lines drawn with the pearl, and the outer circle suggested with the feather. The arc that needed to pass through the central lines just so, in order to properly draw the lines of the Weave taut so that he could thread the next line between them. 

When everything was exact, was where it needed to be, and he could imagine the strands of magic wrapped around his fingers as a gentle pressure so vividly that, when he moved his hands, the drag of them against his skin felt real in his mind, he reached down and grazed the edge of the beacon with his fingertips, and allowed the magic to fall off them and down into it as he spoke the final lines of the incantation. A muddled, but familiar, power swept the spell out of his mind an instant after it completed. He took a few deep breaths, and focused on what little of the beacon was showing outside the rock that cradled it, and reached out for a familiar mote of possibility. 

The world fell away.

He stood in a space that was not a space, a plethora of selves walking out along unknown paths. A fragment of light hung in the air, brighter than he remembered it, and he heard a sound like soft music at a distance. He moved, even as he thought of reaching out, and found himself standing in front of the mote. The light of it brightened, and the music rose until he could nearly make out its melody. A blink. A shift. He was looking at himself, standing on the other side of the mote, watching himself reach out to it, a small smile on his lips. Then his other self looked up, their eyes met, and he reached out as well. His other self shifted, his eyes becoming gentle, his face less firm, a beard flickered in the shade of not-quite-permanence along his cheeks. Age wrinked around his eyes and shot white and silver through his hair, and then he fragmented, falling into motes. 

Caleb struggled to know how he felt; he wasn’t panicked, wasn’t distressed, but there was an aching profundity that drew a wordless noise from his throat as he reached out for the soft motes of his other self, trying to grasp them. The light of possibility in front of him brightened, and he knew, in the same way he knew how to breathe, that it found him interesting. That it had been lonely. That it was looking for a home. That it wanted certainty even as it offered its possibilities. And he knew that it knew him, but it asked him anyway.

He reached out to it, and his other self coalesced once more, into him but not him. He drew the mote into himself and gave it a home.

The feeling of its soft warmth in his chest, its music in his ears, steadied him as he blinked to find himself back in the field, by the half-dismantled wall, with his friends watching over him. They were, he frowned a little, more amused than relieved or concerned. 

“So, it _is_ a new beacon, then!” Jester said, before Caleb could say anything.

“Ja,” he said, and didn’t bother hiding his annoyance. “I can confirm that it is another piece of Luxon.”

Jester laughed at him and Beau grinned. He wrinkled his nose for a moment and then sighed out his frustrations. It wasn’t as if he’d had a hope of keeping this one secret in the first place, and so it made little sense to hold onto his frustration about their practice of guessing.

A small part of him argued that he should hide the stone under his coat anyway, to take it far from them, and keep it for himself. 

“So,” Beau said, leaning on her bow-staff, her grin worsening. “You and the Luxon, eh? I know I’m not one to judge, but you seem to be moving pretty fast there.”

Fjord snorted, and Nott looked torn, but Jester looked wide eyed between him and Beau, a little baffled.

“What?” she asked, and Caduceus echoed her a beat behind.

“You know, that noise he made, the beacon shining like that…” Beau said, gesturing broadly in his direction. “Intellectual magic stuff as well… Love at first sight.”

Jester looked absolutely delighted, and made a sound twisted between a squeal and a laugh, while behind her, Caduceus nodded sagely.

The part of him that called these people home, that couldn’t bear the thought of leaving them, that was bolstered by the Luxon’s loneliness and its desperate need for a home, was at war with the part that thought they were all arseholes and that he would be better off without them. His embarrassment had sided with the latter, and it was the first time in a long while that he’d entertained the thought of leaving.

Caduceus gave him a slight smile, and a wink that no one else would’ve seen. While he had no idea what that meant Caduceus thought he knew, it was enough for him to push away his darker panic. None of them relished his embarrassment, or would push it to shame. He hung his head and let his blush take over as he considered his strategy. He rubbed his thumb against the exposed piece of beacon and felt a soft rush of warmth, like a cat pushing its head against his chest. He knew, the same way he could tell Frumpkin’s moods, that it didn’t understand the teasing, or his uncertainty, but it wanted to.

“Are you okay, Caleb?” Fjord asked, and Caleb belatedly realized that Nott was patting his knee.

She looked worried. He blinked as he realized the time, his internal clock telling him he’d been staring at the beacon for six minutes and forty-three seconds. The Luxon liked how he knew the time. He blinked again and found his voice.

“This… I think… I…” he couldn’t find the right words, wasn’t sure what to say. _I think I’ve found religion_. He resorted to the joke the Luxon wanted to understand. “This thing between us is very new. Please do not tease us about it, Beauregard,” he said, knowing some of his uncertainty would seem like shyness.

Beau sputtered. 

“Wait, what?” 

“Really, Caleb?!” Jester asked, at the same time, eyes wide as they could go.

He nodded, and looked over to see Nott assessing him suspiciously. He touched his little finger to his thumb on his right hand, their old sign for an off-the-cuff con. Nott looked between his face and the beacon, carefully avoiding exaggerated movements, and let her eyes widen.

“Wow, Caleb, um… that sound you made,” she said.

Caleb felt himself lock in place. He remembered. He wasn’t sure what his face did, but he was pretty sure he knew what he would’ve sounded like to them. What he’d just claimed he’d…

_Beau was looking for you to deny it; now she’s going to be convinced you secretly get aroused by magical artifacts,_ snarked his self-critical side. _They’re all going to think that. Well done, idiot._

The key to a good con was to confirm people’s assumptions.

“Oh, ah, well,” he dithered, looking at the ground. “Sorry you had to hear that.”

They didn’t laugh. He clutched the rock closer to himself, and had a quick jerky look around their faces. Only Caduceus seemed amused; the rest were intensely awkward, though Nott made a surreptitious ‘time’ signal. 

He rolled his shoulders back and smiled at them.

“You should see your faces,” he said, pausing to laugh a little in quiet huffs out his nose. “I did not have sex with the Luxon, you perverts, it was just…” he frowned and trailed off as he tried to arrange how to say it.

There was a certain amount of relieved laughter, and Fjord patted him hard on the shoulder, causing him to wince and shrink away. Nott took the opportunity to mock Fjord for his strength and Caduceus mentioned they should put the wall back. Beau’s eyes remained on him, and, as the others got to work, with Nott pointing out which rocks would fit where, and Jester, Fjord and Caduceus doing the heavy lifting, she came over and sat beside him.

She didn’t say anything, just waited for him to find his words, even though he could tell she was just bursting to ask. She always got more still, more quiet and meditative, when she really wanted something these days. 

“These beacons are incredibly powerful,” he began quietly after a while. The others quieted down to listen in almost immediately, and he found himself smiling a bit. They were all a nosy bunch. “This one is, ah, very young? The other one was much more… calm. Like Caduceus and Jester. But I think… the other one knew more, and this one is like a Jester leaving home.” He fell silent, waiting for their questions. 

“Is it going to buy clothes for its horse?” Fjord asked, barely straight faced.

There was general laughter, and a break of the tension that had swept in on Caleb’s words. Then Beau rocked her shoulder into his.

“Does that mean that this is a different Luxon, a different god? What was it like looking inside it?”

Caleb’s brain ticked over, and the Luxon rubbed against him, again, in what he took as confirmation.

“I think it is still a part of the same Luxon,” he said, carefully. “But it is also a separate part. It, ah, it doesn’t seem to have experienced much of anything, and it is very curious.” He looked across at Beau to see her eyebrows climbing intrepidly up her forehead. He shook his head slightly. “It doesn’t know… well. It knows what I remember but that is not the same as experience for it,” he explained, and the sentiment rang true in his head, along with a mounting curiosity that he tried to ignore. 

Beau narrowed her eyes at him.

“What has it done to you?” she asked, rightly suspicious.

He rubbed his thumb over the edge of the beacon, noting almost absentmindedly that it was smaller than the other one. The music he couldn’t hear hummed pleasantly in the back of his mind.

“I think I might have been consecuted,” he said.

\-------------------------------------

The rest of the day had been largely spent in debate over what to do. It was obvious that the Wildmother had done what Caduceus and Fjord had struggled to ask her to, but it didn’t mean that they had any more fulfilled Essek’s request than when they’d detoured to follow the lead she had given them. And now, with what the new beacon whispered in baffled wonderment in the back of Caleb’s mind, they knew that it wasn’t a case of ‘any beacon will do’. 

As Nott put it, it was seeming less a case of theft and more one of kidnapping. 

But Caleb didn’t want _this_ piece of the Luxon anywhere _near_ the Cerberus Assembly. It was bad enough dragging all his friends into danger, but this felt like bringing Kiri along for the ride. The beacon couldn’t defend itself, and he couldn’t slip it away into a pocket dimension at the first sign of danger as he could with Frumpkin. At the same time, though, he was having a hard time fathoming being parted from it. He’d refused Jester’s offer to carry it for him, eventually snapping a bit in a way that had Beau give him a sharp look. 

If they did take it back to Rosohna, they had no easy way to teleport back to their current position deep in the Empire. And, while Caleb was more willing to trust the people who worshipped the Luxon to take care of it, he still wasn’t sure if he could bear to leave it there. Unsure of whether to stay or go, or what he was going to do, he sat with his back against the straw in the barn they’d been sleeping in, and largely listened to the argument.

When it boiled down to ‘we need to ask Essek’, he wasn’t sure he entirely agreed.

There was also the question of what to do about Nott. If he was now consecuted, with the promise of another life after he died, he had to wonder if they could do the same for Nott. Bind her to the beacon, so that, when she died, she would be reborn into another body.

“Maybe Jester should send her messages after we eat,” he suggested, interrupting their argument about how to pack the most meaning into the fewest words. 

“That’s probably sensible,” Caduceus agreed. “We might not get the chance for a while if we do go back to Rosohna.”

That largely settled matters, as, despite the lack of flavour or abundance of bugs in the food they had available to them, they had all walked a long way. As Caduceus fried chunks of his summoned ‘food substitute’, Caleb waved Nott over. Pulling out his copper wire, and locking eyes momentarily with Beau to let her know he knew she was trying to eavesdrop, he cast message to Nott.  
“Nott, Beau is trying to listen in, but I wanted to ask you if you wanted to see about being consecuted.”

She looked over at Beau and pulled out her own wire.

“I see her. Is this for me to become myself again? Youcanreplytothismessage.”

“I’m not sure it would work perfectly. From what I have been told, you would have to grow up again.” he huffed in frustration at the magic falling away, and recast. “And would need to remember everything later. It also seems to be impossible to choose what you come back as.”

Nott paused for a long moment, staring into the middle distance, before shaking her head a little and pulling her knees to her chest. Eventually she raised her hand cupping the wire.

“If we did that, and you killed me. I’d miss Luc growing up. I wouldn’t remember Yeza.”

Caleb nodded, silently. She looked down at the Luxon in his lap.

“I wouldn’t…” she paused, realizing she hadn’t recast, but then pressed on quietly. “It might be nice, knowing that if I die in a trap, that one day I can go back to them. But I can’t give up what little I have for a memory of this in however long. Maybe I’d be a goblin again. I can’t.”

He reached out to take hold of her forearm where it wrapped around her knees. 

“You don’t have to,” he said, softly. “We will find another way.” Then his lips quirked as he let her go and sat back. “It will make it easier to give it up to the Dynasty, if we aren’t trying to consecute you.”

“What about you?” Nott asked, suddenly, loudly enough that he saw, out the corner of his eye, Beau raise her brows slightly from where she was pretending not to listen. “What if Jester’s healing won’t work on you anymore. What if you can’t be brought back if you go down?”

“That is— we will cross that bridge when we come to it. There has always been the chance. I am always going to be a squishy wizard.”

Beau snorted loudly, and drew everyone’s attention 

“A squishy wizard in a mail shirt who can throw fucking fireballs,” she said. “Not even mentioning his kick-arse friends.”

She punched her own hand to play tough, and Nott put on a hopeless face and made a show of going for her flask. Caleb let the seriousness fall away from the conversation, even as he dropped his hand back to the beacon and let it sing to him about possibility.

**Author's Note:**

> This will be updated when I have time.


End file.
